Hinton, William

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William Hinton. Shenfan: the Continuing Revolution in a Chinese Village. New York: Random House, 1983.

In Shenfan, William Hinton does precisely what the title (“shenfan” meaning deep tillage, deep overturning) suggests—he digs deep into the revolutionary experience of a Shanxi village and reveals a rich story of conflict, contradiction and cooperation in rural China. After more than twenty years of exile from Long Bow (due primarily to the State Department’s denial of a passport), Hinton finally returned to the village in 1971 to find a world vastly different from the one he had left in 1949. This book chronicles how, with the aid of his daughter Carma, he continues the work of Fanshen and in six separate visits from 1971 to 1981 attempts to reconstruct the turbulent political and economic changes that had swept through the countryside.

Hinton’s account is a wealth of detail from cover to cover. The nearly eight hundred pages of text and intricate coverage caused one reviewer to remark that “even devotees of Dream of the Red Chamber would be confused by the gigantic cast that appears in the continuing saga of Long Bow” (Norma Diamond, JAS 44.4, Aug. 1985, p. 791). Through extensive interviews and close contacts with Long Bow villagers that go as far back as 1949, Hinton illuminates the conditions of day-to-day peasant life in a way that has rarely been seen before or since. Shenfan’s strength also lies in the way the author allows the words of his interviewees to speak for themselves. While the scattered memories of various villagers may seem to detract from the coherence of the narrative, the often free-flowing presentation of their recollections without excessive narrator intrusion is effective in showing how various people in Long Bow thought through problems and dealt with historical memory in different ways. Thus, major events in village life like the mass campaigns of the Great Leap Forward, the Socialist Education Movement, and the amusing frenzy of the pig-raising movement in 1971 are juxtaposed with village gossip and war stories told by nostalgic peasants. While this sometimes leads to confusion over relative timing of events—as the book does not strictly adhere to a chronological approach—the overall effect of Hinton’s use of anecdotes is a fascinating picture of how contradictions played out in rural Chinese life.

In his reconstruction of the Cultural Revolution’s factional fighting in and around Long Bow, Hinton pays close attention to the interaction between local village events and events at higher levels of administration. His analysis of the rise and fall of extraordinary careerists like “Old Dare” Yang Chengxiao in Shanxi points to “powerful centrifugal impulses” in Chinese society that fed factionalism at the provincial, regional, local, clan and sect level; at the same time, he states that “impulses from below would…never have driven an entire province to virtual civil war, had they not been fanned from above at each instance…” (p. 648). Hinton alternates between local narratives and his own knowledge of events in Beijing (including Qinghua, the subject of his Hundred Day War) to illustrate how factional fighting not only in Long Bow, but throughout Shanxi and beyond, had little to do with important ideological or political differences and more to do with “the ‘outs’ expressing dissatisfaction with the performance of the ‘ins’” (p. 521). His narrative also reveals a meticulous attention to factors which may account for the intensity of the Cultural Revolution in Long Bow. The village’s semi-suburban proximity to factories and railroad access, social cleavages by lineage and geographical divides along a north-south axis—and ultimately the failure of collectivization to substantially raise per capita yields in the poor soil—contributed to Long Bow’s volatility during the GPCR in ways that were perhaps atypical of other “rural” locales. Ultimately, he summarizes the Cultural Revolution as a “series of intertwined events so surreal and bizarre…that no novelist could hope to dream them up, and no reporter could hope to reconstruct them in full” (p. 492).

Shenfan is not a disinterested appraisal of collectivization in rural China. Hinton strongly supports the Dazhai model commune and does not see the failure of some communes—which he sees as caused by blind directives and misguided policy from higher cadres—as a reason to repudiate the whole collective movement. Hence, he is critical of post-Mao de-collective policies. This leaves room for the potential criticism that Hinton speaks too glowingly of the “potential power of the village collective” (p. 756) or gives biased examples of improvements in Long Bow. However, Hinton’s argument that well-run collectives effectively promote local autonomy against the heavy hand of bureaucratic centralism is thought provoking.

Hinton states from the outset that his objective in investigating and describing the revolutionary experience of Long Bow village remains what it was when he penned Fanshen: “to reveal through the microcosm of one small village something of the essence of the continuing revolution in China” (p. xviii). It may well be asked whether such a microcosm and its experiences can indeed be extrapolated to larger issues in China’s long revolution. The answer may ultimately lie in the reader’s own informed judgment and gift of hindsight. Nevertheless, with this detailed and thoughtful account—which one reviewer deemed “[a] must reading for anyone interested in contemporary China” (Edward Friedman, Pacific Affairs 57.1, Spring 1984, p. 120)—William Hinton argues his case persuasively and surely leaves his mark on our understanding of how successive waves of revolution transformed the lives of thousands, if not millions, in rural China.

Dahpon Ho